Blog

A collaborative blog series about collaborative research: a data scientist and a cognitive psychologist combine perspectives.

Dr. Alicia Knoedler: For the past 18 years, I have sought opportunities and means to advocate for researchers working to develop and accelerate their research programs. I had the very fortunate opportunity to meet Dave King in 2014 when he relocated his company to Oklahoma City.

Have you ever read the book Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck? The first part of the book is John Steinbeck talking about his lifelong affliction with wanderlust. I spent a few years living out of a VW camper van, indulging my own wanderlust affliction, so the book quickly claimed a special place in my heart. Steinbeck is such a skilled writer, and he describes the feeling -

Everything is derivative. Take advantage of that. “New” ideas are the next step in an extensive network of existing people and ideas. If we can get the data and reconstruct the network, we can analyze it and understand where branches of a network have the potential for innovation.

“Good ideas are getting harder to find,” Exaptive CEO Dave King quotes a recent paper by MIT and Stanford researchers. He points to the skyrocketing number of researchers employed in the U.S. and contrasts it with the inverse slope on a chart monitoring efficiency of researchers along the same timeline. “Those growing number of researchers are failing to produce value that outpaces what we’re spending to innovate.”

So many fantastic quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein. If you hear our CEO Dave King speak, he may bring up his favorite: “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” To have an aha moment, we have to play with a challenge from a variety of perspectives. We have to build collaborative teams to tackle complex problems.

Figuring out how to build the team with the greatest chance for success can be complicated. Ideal innovation partners may be isolated geographically, in different time zones, or just not aware of the skills their coworkers can bring to a project. At Exaptive, our main goal is to facilitate innovation. We use sophisticated technology to help groups assemble research teams for collaboration, and we've found we can demonstrate the concept on paper. Cue the choir as the gates open to Exaptive’s Cognitive City!